Ezra Klein: September 20, 2009 - September 26, 2009

1) Don't forget to stop tipping your waiters. 2) More than half of all industry lobbyists working on health care formerly worked for the government. That includes 55 former congressmen. 3) A Moody's insider says the ratings agencies are back...

The first amendment considered in the Senate Finance Committee's mark-up was Sen. Jim Bunning’s demand that the bill be converted into legislative language and the CBO take two to three weeks to render a full score before there's a...

Shadowfax gets me wrong here. I don't hate doctors, or blame them for operating room errors. But I've read a substantial number of studies where doctors and nurses did blind evaluations of malpractice suits and overwhelmingly found them meritorious. Totally...

On June 17, Rep. Roy Blunt made a promise: "I guarantee you we will provide you with a [health care] bill." The "we" in that sentence referred to the House Republicans. But they've not united around a bill. Glenn...

Jane Hamsher has a quick roundup of the prospects for a public option being amended to the Finance Committee's bill. As she says, the proposal to watch is Chuck Schumer's "level playing field" proposal. But should it be? The relevant...

Nice one from XKCD today: The regulation requiring food producers to list the amount of trans fats in their food had the beneficial effect of sharply reducing the amount of trans fats in foods. But it had the annoying effect...

“In the course of a few years," writes Michael Gerson, "a fringe party was able to define a national community by scapegoating internal enemies; elevate a single, messianic leader; and keep the public docile with hatred while the state...

The music sounds like the sort of thing the W hotel pumps through its lobby, but this Economist video on the changing media landscape -- and the tidal flood of information -- is striking. It's an amazing time to be...

Uwe Reinhardt walks you through WellPoint's most recent income statement. It's useful stuff. I'd particularly direct reader attention, however, to the breakdown of revenues: According to WellPoint’s income statement for 2008, the company’s total revenue that year was $61,579.2 million....

It's a bit late in the game to start armchair-quarterbacking framing decisions, but I like Mark Kleiman's idea of calling the public option "Medicare Part E." The "E" is particularly clever, as it follows Medicare Part D (the drug program)...

Over at Slate, Timothy Noah is liveblogging the Senate Finance markup. Good stuff. I didn't know, for instance, that the Senate checks out for Yom Kippur, but I'm rather delighted by it. This, however, I could have predicted: The morning's...

Gotta love political debates in France. To sell the unpopular changes, Lagarde turned to philosophy. In an address to the National Assembly, she said, "There is hardly an ideology that we haven't turned into a theory. We have in our...

According to Congress Daily, the CBO says attaching the public plan to Medicare rates will save even more money than originally thought: In a bid to wrangle concessions from the Blue Dog Coalition on healthcare reform, House leaders Thursday released...

The argument against the government's effort to force financial companies to offer some "plain vanilla" products is that it's direct government intrusion into the marketplace. "I remember the days when the bars had to serve food if they were...

Andrew Gelman thinks the Democrats might lose the House in 2010. Other people try to debunk him. I try not to make predictions on these things 13 months before the next election, but here's a prediction I'm comfortable making: Sometime...

Sen. Kent Conrad chairs the Budget Committee, serves on the Finance Committee and was a member of the Gang of Six. I spoke to Conrad today about what Americans can learn from other health-care systems, why he opposes the public...

Bill Nelson, the senior senator from Florida, represents a lot of retirees. He represents, more specifically, a lot of retirees on Medicare Advantage. So though the Democrat is a supporter of health-care reform, he's calling for seniors to be shielded...

This is the most depressing paragraph I've read today: At a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner announced that the administration had dropped one provision in its plan for a consumer financial protection agency...

Germany is apparently filling up with a new sort of street food vendor: the type who carries his kitchen on his back. Why the rugged approach? It's a case of bad regulation giving way to some pretty serious innovation. Germany...

Looks like Kennedy family confidant Paul Kirk will be named interim senator from Massachusetts. There was a quick round of dream candidates last week -- Atul Gawande being a prominent name -- but this is probably for the best....

Dallas, Tex: So the Baucus bill is a handout to the insurance companies. It seems to be another ineffective (at least for me, employed, have insurance) govt spending program that will not deliver the desired results for the amount of...

James Surowiecki explains how the government contributed to the problem with the ratings agencies. [O]ver the years the government has made the agencies an increasingly important part of the financial system. Rating agencies have been around for a century, and...

Noon Eastern. You can submit questions here, or join in live. We can talk about whatever, but I'm hoping you all throw some "Top Chef" questions in the mix. I have complicated feelings on last night's quickfire....

Daniel Davies notices the University of Notre Dame doing a very, very strange thing. Do you find yourself considering the financial crisis and thinking “well, neoclassical economists have certainly come through this one with their reputations enhanced! Anyone with a...

The emerging Republican attack on health-care reform is that Democrats are going to cut your Medicare. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Democrats must be feeling pretty flattered right now. But is it true? Sort of. At issue...

The carbon emission implications of this are pretty terrifying: For every newly converted vegetarian, four poor humans start earning enough money to put beef on the table. In the past three decades, the earth's dominant carnivores have tripled our...

David Leonhardt’s column today is a smart take on medical malpractice costs: The direct costs of malpractice lawsuits — jury awards, settlements and the like — are such a minuscule part of health spending that they barely merit discussion, economists...

Andrew Sullivan gets letters: I'm an American who has also decided to leave the US ... because of my concerns over healthcare. You see, my European wife has a chronic disease that worsened soon after we moved to the U.S....

Is higher education the next industry to fall before the Internet? Kevin Carey investigates: In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries — automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins,...

You guys like polls, right? 45% approve of Obama’s handling of health care, while 46% disapprove, which is up from his 41%-47% score last month. By comparison, just 21% approve of the Republican Party’s handling of the issue. The Republican...

Quote one: As recently as a month ago, Chuck Grassley ... announced that the way to get universal coverage is "through an individual mandate." He told Nightly Business report, "That's individual responsibility, and even Republicans believe in individual responsibility."...

Members of the Senate Finance Committee appear to believe that the American people pay a lot of attention to what they do and don't do. One amendment would lead to the American people breathing a "sigh of relief" as they...

A couple of delivery system commentaries came in late yesterday, after I'd finished writing the blog for the day. By coincidence, both of them are critical of Baucus's bill, and so offer an interesting counter-perspective to the generally complimentary missives...

Conservatism has often struck me as a philosophy that works better in theory than in practice. Evidently, Eric Cantor agrees: Yesterday in Richmond, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) reminded us how hollow Republicans can sound addressing real people with real problems....

There's an interesting -- well, sort of interesting -- debate going on at the Finance Committee's mark-up right now. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) has an amendment forcing the Senate Finance Committee to delay its vote until a final CBO score...

The graph above comes from Edward Cody's overview of the French health-care system. Compared with the U.S. health-care system, the French system covers everyone, spends less, and sees its costs rise more slowly. It's a pretty impressive performance. Even...

From Sen. Kent Conrad's remarks at Tuesday's Finance Committee hearing: Let me just conclude for my progressive friends who believe that the only answer to getting costs under control and having universal coverage is by a government-run program. I urge...

1) James Surowiecki on reforming the rating agencies. 2) Alyssa Katz on reforming the ratings agencies. 3) Kent Conrad doesn't want the Finance Committee to hold a vote for at least two weeks. 4) Why is soda so expensive in...

You all know who Peter Orszag is. So rather than wasting time on an introduction, I'll just jump right into our interview on the delivery system reforms. You’ve been in a lot of these internal discussions. How much of the...

The Massachusetts Senate joined the state's House today in approving a bill to appoint an interim replacement for Sen. Ted Kennedy. Deval Patrick is likely to move on this quickly, and Democrats will have their 60th vote long before the...

Chris Jennings served as a senior health care adviser to the White House from 1993 to 2000. He wasn't quite a czar, but close. And so he is particularly sensitive to the political structuring of some of this stuff. You...

I love the anecdotes streaming forth from Matt Latimer's tell-all about the Bush administration. And I love the counter-anecdotes angrily administered by Latimer's former boss. But what does annoy me is Latimer's refrain that this is really the tale of...

Len Nichols directs the health-care policy program at the New America Foundation, and is usually my first call when I don't understand something. The Chairman’s mark would create two new entities that could accelerate the delivery system reforms we need....

Harold Pollack is a professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, a faculty chair of the university's Center for Health Administration Studies, and a frequent contributor to the New Republic's Treatment blog. Folks who...

Sara Rosenbaum is chairman of the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University. She also led the team that drafted Bill Clinton's 1993 Health Security Act. And she brings up a piece of this that's not betting much attention,...

David Cutler is Dean of the Social Sciences and Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University, which, you'll have to admit, is pretty impressive. He was also one of the Obama campaign's most influential health-care policy advisers. The...

The Congressional Budget Office has scored Ron Wyden's Free Choice amendment: Relative to the Chairman’s mark, the amendment as modeled would reduce the net impact on federal deficits by about $1 billion over 10 years. There would not be substantial...

Speaking of CBO scores, the agency is also scoring H.R. 676, John Conyer's single-payer proposal. This is a byproduct of the deal Waxman and Pelosi struck with the House Progressive Caucus to allow the bill a full floor vote. In...

Henry Aaron -- or Hank Aaron, as he's called -- is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on the economics of health care. He's also one of my favorite reality checks: About as far from an...

Judy Feder is a former congressional candidate and dean of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, and a health-care policy expert at the Center for American Progress. "I fear this will be terribly boring," she said when I asked her to...

Whining about the length of a bill is the first refuge of the scoundrel. It's supposed to denote complexity and ambition and overreach. But what it really proves is that legislative language is sort of arcane. Consider two of the...

There are two halves to health-care reform. There's the coverage half, which relies on changes to the insurance market. Then there's the cost half, which relies on changes to the delivery system. The problem is that it doesn't get talked...

1) This New Yorker blog post is funnier than any shouts and murmurs ever written. 2) Kick -- err, regulate -- the banks while they are down. 3) Everything you always wanted to know about the prospect of leaving the...

Steve Pearlstein had a nice column last Friday on rating agency reform -- which is arguably the most important aspect of financial regulation reform. They're the one player whose proper functioning could have prevented, well, everything. If all the...

Is this the long-awaited definition of success? Improving the Afghan government, McChrystal says -- particularly the effectiveness of its security forces and its ability to deliver basic services to the population -- is as critical as offensive actions against insurgents....

There are three major compromises still to be struck on health-care reform. The first is what to do about the public option. The second is affordability. And the third is financing. Increasingly, I'm seeing the glimmers of a rough consensus...

Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants more troops for Afghanistan. And of course he does: He's the general in charge of Afghanistan. Which is to say, he's a person in charge of something. Neil Sinhababu explains: It's generally hard to know...

I'm unabashed in my enthusiasm for Imogen Heap, and her new album, "Ellipse," has done nothing to diminish my admiration. Here she plays 'Wait It Out" at the TED Global Conference in London. Give the video three minutes. It'll put...

Mike Konczal takes a look at one of the first deals reached by Geithner's half-living PPIP program. The assets, in this case, come from Franklin Bank, a Houston-based lender who failed and got taken over by the FDIC last November....

A good comment from etdean1 on my "Czars and Secretaries" post: Keeping track of all the things Glenn Beck doesn't get is a losing battle. The czar thing also bugged me because it's not an official title. Like if people...

It's becoming pretty common for Hill and administration sources to tell me that "Olympia Snowe is more of a Democrat than some of the Democrats." What they mean by that is that she's pushing for a level of affordability and...

Trying to respond to the concerns of fringe political movements is a bit like pouring water on a grease fire: It seems like it should work, but it really, really doesn't. That's why I've basically stayed out of this...

Page 207 of the thrilling "Amendments Relating to Expanding Health Care Coverage" (PDF) is going to get a lot of attention. Sandwiched between a Hatch amendment to restrict abortion and a Snowe amendment to expand subsidies to working people being...

On Aug. 29, 1994, Adam Clymer, Robert Pear and Robin Toner published 6,500-word look at where health-care reform went wrong. It makes for interesting reading, both due to the similarities and the differences. In the similarities column, an economic crisis...

"If the election were held today," says House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), "we would have the majority of the House back." I'm not enough of an election wonk to say whether that's true. But it's hard to square with...